Scheckner said that she had no transracial clients (yet) but had worked with people who wanted to change their bodies and that being “transracial” is basically the same thing.

“If someone feels that they feel at home with a certain religion, a certain race, a certain culture, I think that if that’s who they really feel inside, life is about finding out who you are. The more knowledge you have of yourself, the happier you can be.”

“And, as long as it’s not hurting yourself or anyone else, I don’t see a problem with that.”

Why are we treating religion and race like interchangeable concepts? How does a licensed professional even fix her mouth to say something like that?

Listen, you can (and maybe should) embrace cultures that aren’t your own. And having lived overseas, I’ve witnessed many a person who found a new, arguably more authentic home in another culture and place.

When I lived in Vietnam, I saw white men marry Vietnamese women and have Vietnamese children and decide that they related so much more to Vietnamese culture that they applied for Vietnamese citizenship. I have even heard some of these men (and some women) say they “feel” more Vietnamese than American or British or Australian.

The last part was always puzzling to me, but fine. They were talking about a place as much as a culture, and I’ve never known any of them to try to pass themselves off as ethnically Vietnamese. Being expats, they understood their privilege and the power imbalance between being a native Vietnamese and being from a Western country.

But filing for citizenship or claiming kinship is altogether different from taking on an ethnic identity: The latter is theft.

*****

Thankfully, Ja Du hasn’t gone the way of other “transracial” assholes and physically altered her features to appear more Filipino, but the concept remains the same.

Mental illness is the missed diagnosis. This person is not sane by ANY traditional diagnostic “procedure”, but totally insecure in its interactions with others so it has to claim some anomaly in its mind that makes it a totally new person, even though it is in no sense what it now says it is. A society that puts this nonsensical idea up as a truth is headed to destruction. Mental illness must be reanalyzed and these people need an intervention to stop this madness. Some are even stupid enough to allow a child to actually act out their fantasies and… Read more »